A Netflix series puts the media on trial. But real life is more dramatic

Produced by actor George Clooney, lawyer and author Jeffrey Toobin, and others, this documentary highlights how in some cases gavel-to-gavel coverage wasn't just a throwaway term.

In Todd Phillips’ Oscar-winning film Joker, the protagonist played by the inimitable Joaquin Phoenix shoots three men in a subway and then disappears, plunging New York City in chaos as news of a shooter on the loose gets out. These scenes, the foundations of the myth of the Joker, were inspired by an event from the mid-1980s, when an engineer called Bernhard Goetz shot four black teenagers on a New York City subway train and disappeared. No one knew the shooter’s identity, and so the press dubbed him the “Subway Vigilante”, as New Yorkers frustrated by the city’s high crime